Supporting astronomy research

Like all today's professional telescopes, the Rubin Observatory will use detectors like the ones inside your digital camera to take images of the night sky. 

When the Rubin Observatory is fully operational, it will take over 100,000 digital images per night, with each image containing tens of thousands of stars and galaxies. In total, Rubin will deliver roughly 20 terabytes of imaging data every night. This must all be processed and analysed in near real-time to extract as much information about our Universe as possible. This rate of data represents a major challenge for the project, so much so that the LSST’s software developers have built an entirely new, fully automated software system capable of handling the data onslaught.

Rather than building the data processing systems to only work with LSST data, however, Rubin's developers have designed the software so that it can be used to process data from other telescopes as well. One such telescope is the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO). Shown in Figure 1, GOTO's role is to identify the optical counterparts to gravitational wave events, such as the 2017 merger of two neutron stars. 

Like the Rubin Observatory, an important part of the GOTO project is a repeated survey of the night sky. This means astronomers always have a recent set of images to compare against when looking for the astronomical 'flashes' that could signal a gravitational wave event. 

By making Rubin's data processing software open source, i.e. freely available for anyone to use, other science projects – such as GOTO – are able to benefit from this resource. In fact, some of GOTO’s astronomers are using Rubin's processing software to help verify GOTO’s own data processing software. At the same time, projects like GOTO allow UK astronomers to gain early first-hand experience of Rubin's processing software; these experiences can lead to further improvements of this crucial component of the Rubin project.